Thursday, May 31, 2012

Recently the Print Department acquired three Centennial Cabinets, sets of quirky
souvenir cards printed in color on site at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Manufacturers
Empire Press Co., Degener & Weiller, and Greenwood & Batley used the promotional
“post cards” to promote their platen printing presses, presses geared toward
job work, such as cards and handbills.

Interior of Machinery Hall

Although produced to showcase the
superiority of the press on display, most of the cards, which primarily depict exhibition
building exteriors, are not fine specimens. Captions are missing letters, names
of buildings are misspelled, and layers of colors are misaligned for the sake
of unmonitored mass production.

New Hampshire State Building

English Government Building

Ironically, the prints are most engaging to the
modern-day viewer for just these reasons. Despite the flaws, the cards surely also
brought a smile to the fair visitors who purchased them, as they did me.

Lippincott, Grambo & Co. offered The Iris,An Illuminated Annual for1851 in six different binding styles, two of
which are shown above. At the top is what they advertised as “Turkey Morocco
beveled, inlaid with Papier Maché” and below is “Calf…sunk panel and beveled.” These bindings show how
bookbinders, in the competitive era of gift book publishing, bound books with ingenuity
and efficiency.The bookbinder made a
sunken impression in the leather cover that would accommodate the shape of the
papier-mâché panel and also made an arrangement of brass ornaments that stamped
a lacy gold pattern around it. Setting up the brass ornaments and creating the
die that made the deep impression in the leather would have been costly and
time consuming. It is not surprising, then, that the same brass ornaments and
die were used on another version of the same book, with the title stamped in
the sunken area.

The inlaid papier-mâché panel may
have been manufactured for another purpose. With its undulating contour, it
resembles other papier-mâché products from the same period. Attached to an ivory handle, it could have been a hand screen,
or mounted with hinges, it could also have been a box lid. Papier-mâché
manufacturers used punches and forms to create various shapes, and the
bookbinders had the ingenuity to use the papier-mâché in interesting ways.

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The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Open to the public free of charge, the Library Company houses an extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art. Founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, the Library Company is America's oldest cultural institution and served as the Library of Congress from the Revolutionary War to 1800. The Library Company was the largest public library in America until the Civil War.

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